


Cake Days

by glitteratiglue



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Baking, Families of Choice, Feels, Fluff, Friendship, Gen, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Romance, Sam Wilson's recovery, mention of British TV show
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-12
Updated: 2015-09-12
Packaged: 2018-04-20 11:22:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4785533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glitteratiglue/pseuds/glitteratiglue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A little flour and a little faith: sometimes that's all you need.</p><p>(In which Sam bakes things and everyone has a lot of feelings.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cake Days

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this](http://pansxualbarnes.tumblr.com/post/126705145340/i-really-imagine-sam-wilson-to-be-a-stress-baker) tumblr post. I have a lot of feelings about Sam and wanted to focus on his recovery for a change.

Sam cracks an egg into the bowl of his stand mixer and studies the next stage of the recipe.

There are worse ways to cope than baking, he figures. It's better than all the other things he tried when he first came back. Drinking himself into oblivion worked for a bit, until it didn't and he got sick of waking up feeling crappy with a pounding head. Casual sex left him empty and longing for real affection; he's never been that guy. He never considered drugs for a second - no, not after what Riley went through before he joined the service, what he told Sam about the years he lost to heroin addiction on the streets of Olympia.

This way, nobody gets hurt. He whisks and stirs and beats and folds to his own insomniac rhythm, and at the end there's something delicious. There's always way too much for him alone, so he takes his creations to the VA, where his colleagues are only too happy to receive the fruits of his labours.

Baking is precise, meticulous: it's order, and order is good on nights like this one, when Sam can't catch a breath enough to sleep.

In his kitchen, he can shut out everything but the steps in the recipe: _crack eggs into bowl, beat in the sugar. Dry ingredients. Wet ingredients._

Read the recipe. And again. Read the recipe.

If he keeps reading it and following the steps, nothing will happen. He will be able to ignore the way his spine is tense and his chest feels like a band is wrapped around it, pulling tighter every second.

Tonight it's cherry cake, the one he baked with his grandmother in her kitchen as a small boy. He turns the mixer on low and shakes in the cinnamon, his nose tickling when the dust rises. It smells like better times, of fresh-scrubbed floors and pulling his cousin Tina's pigtails. The cherry juice turns his fingers purple as he pits each one and throws it into the bowl.

 _Purple_. Sam shudders out a breath, thinks about the Purple Heart in his desk drawer that Riley's mom was kind enough to let him keep.

“ _Hey, you can take mess duty more often, Wilson. This piece-of-shit cake isn't half bad.” Riley grins wide and mischievous, shoves the rest of the slice into his mouth._

“ _Really? I thought you were the one just dying to put on that little white apron.” Sam laughs, still holding the tray of cherry cake he'd rustled up from their ration packs and the help of some bursting-ripe cherries from a kind villager he passed on the way back to camp this morning. His hands are stained purple from the juice._

“ _You look better in it, sweetheart,” Riley says through a mouthful of cake, and Daniels and Anzino laugh in the background._

“ _Blow me.” Sam turns away, still smiling to himself._

He surfaces with cherry juice dripping onto his pants, his fingers digging into the flesh of the small, squashed fruits he's still holding.

The memory is a cruel reminder that the last time Sam was happy, he was in a goddamn war zone. He's a fuck-up, a joke, who gives speeches on how to put your life back together while every part of him is in pieces on the inside. It's no way to live, but it's the only way he knows how to. He couldn't go back, not after that.

When the cherry cake is done, he makes two more.

The hours tick by.

No sleep tonight.

That's fine. He'll live with it, for tonight--that's what he always tells himself; one night at a time. There's always flour and sugar in the cupboard, and nothing can ever be _that_ bad when your house smells like cinnamon.

***

An off-the-books SHIELD apartment in Kraków, Poland and Sam wastes no time in digging around in the fully loaded kitchen for the equipment he needs. It's not guns or ammo or tac vests: just a wooden spoon, a bowl and a square baking pan.

Steve is meant to be resting in the bedroom - an earlier encounter with a small HYDRA cell in the Jewish quarter had left him with a few cuts and bruises. Mostly because the freaking idiot hadn't waited for backup, but Sam is good at keeping his opinions to himself when he needs to. He's had to do it a lot these past months, while they've tracked the Winter Soldier - no, Barnes - across cities and oceans and continents. Sam was on his own for a bit, and that hadn't yielded any better results.

After the mess of Sokovia, Captain America had chosen to lie low and leave his Avengers in the capable hands of Romanoff and Barton. So here they are.

Every lead has been as fruitless as the last; Sam is starting to think they'll never find the slippery bastard. But in the meantime, he's making brownies: they're waiting on more intel and he can't think of a better way to pass the time.

“Hey,” Steve says, coming in.

“Holding up?” Sam doesn't look up from where he's stirring chocolate over a double boiler.

“The cuts are nearly healed, yeah.” Steve smiles faintly, and now Sam is looking and can see that false, brittle smile; he knows what it costs Steve every time he does it.

Since the Winter Soldier's mask fell off, there's been no light in Steve's smile, and the warmth doesn't reach his eyes.

“Any word?” Sam asks, carefully folding the melted chocolate into the mixture. “Can you pass me the chocolate chips?” he adds, and Steve grabs the bag from the table and gives it to him. It's a familiar ritual; Steve doesn't have any particular interest in baking, but he hangs out with Sam while he does it and occasionally helps with important tasks, like licking the bowl.

“I'm still waiting on Natasha. She'll check in within the next twelve hours.” Steve sits down on one of the stiff-backed kitchen chairs and Sam watches his broad shoulders sag, those shoulders that could carry the weight of the world, but some days are barely strong enough to carry his pain.

Sam might not understand everything about Steve Rogers, but he gets that part just fine. He's lived with that same pain every day since Riley fell.

In a few minutes, the room is filled with the heady scent of freshly baked brownies, and even miserable-ass Captain America can't turn them down. Sam eats one, and Steve puts away the rest of the pan like it's nothing.

“You realise I kind of hate you right now, Rogers?” Sam shakes his head.

Steve laughs a little, brushing crumbs from his lips. “God didn't give me these abs for nothing.”

Sam is still getting used to the insane nutritional requirements of super soldiers, but he's noticed that Steve stuffs his pack with protein bars and will take any chance to eat if there's ever downtime. He's embarrassed about his appetite and hates to look greedy - some weird hang-up from growing up in Depression-era New York, Sam has decided - but Steve keeping his body in peak physical condition is in both their interests when they're up against splintered HYDRA remnants on a daily basis.

Sam is happy to bake stuff to help: his own contribution to the war effort. And it is a war - Steve's personal war, a fight for the man he once knew, who may or may not still be out there somewhere. Sam can't really begrudge his friend for wanting to pursue a selfish agenda, for once in his self-righteous do-gooder life. It's heartening to know that even Captain America isn't so noble after all.

It must be playing on his mind more than he thinks, because when he goes to bed that night, his brain throws up a long-buried image.

_There's wind shear in his ears. He watches the body spiral down and down, minus a wing. He isn't screaming, isn't breathing, isn't thinking. Another burst of light in the darkness, and with a nod to the controls, he's diving, trying to outrun the trajectory of the missile. He lands on cold desert sand: though it's enemy territory, he can't stop screaming._

_His throat is raw when the search and rescue team pick him up a few hours later. He wishes the insurgents had found him first; it would be better than having to go on without Riley. He's straight back into the fray the next day: Sam Wilson's no quitter, not when there's a mission to complete. When he tracks his target to a mountain village in Pakistan and finally captures him, there's no relief, no sense of victory. He's numb, and that's when he decides he wants out._

Sam jolts awake, sweat cooling on his skin and his heart about to beat out of his chest.

He has no idea he's been screaming until the door creaks open and he realises he must have woken Steve. Soft footsteps pad over to him in the darkness.

“You okay?” asks Steve, his weight sinking into the boxspring.

Warm arms wrap around Sam, and Steve rests his head on his shoulder.

“You don't have to -”

“Not like you ain't done the same for me,” Steve reminds him.

Sam allows himself to relax into the touch, lets Steve's burly arms ground him and pull him back from the brink.

It was true; he'd done the same for Steve, many times. It had been the worst in those first few weeks after DC; whatever apartment they were in, he would hear Steve down the hallway, crying and moaning in his sleep for Barnes like a man who was barely alive. The first time Sam opened the door to his room, Steve had tried to downplay it, but Sam had seen the empty horror in his eyes and wasn't about to leave. When he'd squashed himself into Steve's bed and held him close, Steve hadn't exactly complained. 

Sam is reminded of the day he and Riley saw a nail bomb kill a ten-year-old girl; an innocent bystander. Riley had swept for all the devices, but he'd missed that one, to great cost. Sam had found his friend squashed in the space between two tents in the sweltering Bakhmala heat, hands wrapped around his knees and shaking like a leaf. He'd knelt there on the sand and held Riley tight, rocked him while he cried blotchy, snotty tears all over Sam's uniform; the others had walked past and kindly pretended not to see.

Soldiers did that for each other, no questions asked; you learned to do whatever you had to in order to hold yourself together.

“Want to go eat the other pan of brownies?” Steve asks against his shoulder. “There's this British baking show on cable that Natasha says is pretty good; we could watch it.”

“Sure.”

They curl up on the couch, munch gooey brownies and watch the bakers of the _Great British Bake Off_ compete for the winner's spot, judged by some presenter who sounds like the Queen and her silver fox sidekick.

Neither of them say much for the rest of the night, but the distraction helps.

_***_

After several weeks and a wild goose chase around Eastern Europe, they end up right back in Kraków. They find Barnes sitting on the steps of an old Baroque church, wild-eyed and unshaven, muttering unintelligible things to himself.

“There something symbolic about this being a Catholic church?” Sam scuffs the toe of his boot in the dirt.

Natasha looks up with an enigmatic smile, and says, “History books say those two were good Catholic boys. I have my own theories.”

They watch Steve approach Barnes slowly, like he's stalking a predator. It would almost be funny if it wasn't so accurate; with a few deft moves, the Winter Soldier could kill any one of them, even Steve. Sam has a healthy respect for that kind of power, even if it scares the shit out of him.

Sam hangs back with Natasha, a wary gaze trained on the church steps, poised to activate his jetpack at the first sign of trouble.

Barnes notices Steve, and he doesn't bolt. He just looks.

Then Steve walks over to Barnes without fear, puts a hand on his shoulder and Barnes looks at him like he's the only person on the planet, recognition flooding his eyes. He grips Steve's hand like he'll never let it go, pulls him down beside him and presses their foreheads together.

It's beautiful and honest and naked, the way they're looking at each other. Sam has to turn away, a lump in his throat.

“Okay, I think I missed something here,” Sam murmurs to Natasha, feeling a little foolish.

Natasha rolls her eyes and snorts, but Sam doesn't miss the way she has to flick a sappy tear from her lashes with her thumb.

“Are you kidding me, Sam? Steve may as well have been wearing a neon sign on his head saying _I love Bucky Barnes_ these past few months.”

Sam thinks about it; really, if he's honest, it's been pretty obvious all along - he just wasn't sure Steve wanted to talk about it, so he kept his mouth shut.

He glances over to where Steve is stroking Barnes' face, running a hand through his hair while Barnes fists his hands in Steve's jacket, clinging to him. Natasha's eyes follow, and there's an oddly tender expression on her face.

“It's kind of cute, really,” Sam admits. “The scary Soviet assassin and Captain America mooning over each other like a couple of teenagers.”

Natasha brushes another tear from her eye and says, “Just so you know, if you ever tell anyone about me crying over Stucky, remember that I know more than a hundred ways to kill you on the spot, and I can make sure nobody ever finds your body.” Her smile is sweet but deadly, and Sam doesn't doubt her words for a second.

He laughs, still watching Steve and Barnes out of the corner of his eye, slumped on the church steps in each other's arms. “Got it. _Stucky?_ ” Sam frowns. “Oh right, I get it.”

Natasha drops her voice and says, “Seriously, Sam, you need to check the internet. It's been shipping these two ever since Steve came back and there was a resurgence of interest in Cap and his Howling Commandos. One of the chorus girls from Steve's USO show back in the forties, Janice O'Malley, even wrote a tell-all book about the secret, suppressed love between Captain America and Sergeant Barnes. It's actually a pretty hot read.”

“Remind me to ask you if I want something from the Captain America lending library,” Sam murmurs, starting to feel like a voyeur.

“Screw yourself, Wilson.” Natasha stomps off in the direction of Steve and Barnes. She rounds on the pair and threatens them with her extra-strength taser if they don't get up, because they all really need to get out of here if they're going to avoid international authorities and any HYDRA presence still lurking in the city.

They go back to the apartment and Natasha calls it in. They have to wait a day for pickup; it could be worse.

Barnes is still startled and hanging onto Steve's arm like it's a life raft. Up close, Sam can see their fugitive is hardly the picture of health; he looks thin and gaunt (for an enhanced specimen, that is) and terrified.

After Steve hauls him off to the bathroom to clean off the worst of the dirt, they can hear his voice in the distance, gently coaxing Barnes into letting him take off his filthy jeans and hoodie and get him into the bath.

Sam doesn't know what to do, so he makes kremówka cream pie; they've got the ingredients for it, and he might as well make something Polish. It's not exactly a celebration, but today has been a breakthrough and that's worth something. He's always liked making puff pastry; the fiddly steps of dough, butter, lamination and rolling it out are comforting and soothing, a chance for him to shut out the white noise in his mind.

He's surprised when Natasha offers to help by whipping up the pastry cream; she has a deft touch for it. “I was a pastry chef in Vienna for a few months, as a cover,” she tells him calmly, running a finger down her wooden spoon to check the consistency of the custard. “Coulson tells me I make the best Sachertorte in the intelligence community.”

“You get more and more interesting every day, Romanoff.”

It's past midnight when the dessert is finally assembled. Natasha stabs her fork through the flaky layers of paper-thin pastry and cream on her plate and chews slowly, savouring it. “Mmm, this is so good. You _have_ to get me the recipe.”

Sam has no idea how he's managed to find himself in an apartment with three highly dangerous people that could kill him in half a second, and instead of that, he's feeding them cake.

His life is weird.

Steve comes in a few minutes later, tired and drawn.

“I managed to get him into the bath, but he doesn't want to talk, just stares straight ahead. I left him some clothes.”

“He needs time, Steve,” Natasha says gently.

“Yeah.” Steve turns and notices the kremówka on the table, brightening. “Oh, that looks good. I'll take a piece.”

Sam passes it over to him, thinks about what on earth they're going to do now they've actually found the Winter Soldier. Steve is hell-bent on the idea that his old friend is still in there somewhere, and maybe he is, but what he struggles to accept is that the Bucky Barnes they've found may not ever be the same one he remembers.

Barnes stumbles out of the bathroom in clean clothes sometime later and shuts himself away in the second bedroom (Sam's room, but he's happy to let him have it). Steve watches, his teeth worrying away his lower lip until they draw blood, but he doesn't follow him.

“You okay?” Natasha asks Steve, her voice uncharacteristically soft.

Steve nods with a clenched jaw. “No. But Bucky will be. He has to be.”

Sam looks up from where he's loading the dishwasher. “Leaving him be right now is the best thing you can do. He let you find him, okay? That's big. The rest is up to him.”

“Thanks for the cake.” Steve smiles sadly and heads towards his own room with heavy steps.

He watches his friend walk away, thinking of Riley. There was a time where he would have given anything - even his own life - if Riley could come back. But he wouldn't want him back like this - not like Barnes, stuck in his own twilight existence of amnesia and shattered thoughts.

Sam leaves a piece of kremówka outside the second bedroom door before he goes to bed, just in case their unexpected guest feels peckish. He takes the floor and Natasha has the couch. He wakes at 3am to the soft glow of the TV and the dulcet tones of silver-haired Paul Hollywood informing a bake off contestant that their banoffee pie has an unacceptably soggy bottom.

He rubs at his sleep-bleary eyes. “You're a troubled sleeper, too?”

“Always.” Her expression is unreadable, but he understands that Natasha's got her own stuff that keeps her up at night, just like him - haven't they all? She shifts on the couch and pats the space next to her. Sam sits down beside her and they while away the small hours together, listening for any sounds from the two bedrooms down the hall.

They don't hear a peep, but in the morning the plate outside Barnes' door is gone, and he's still here. It's something, at least.

_***_

Steve is called in to an emergency meeting at the new SHIELD headquarters, so it falls to Sam to babysit the formerly murderous assassin currently residing in Steve's apartment. He's not all _that_ worried: Barnes has spent months in intensive therapy and by all accounts is relatively normal. That is, if normal means entering the apartment silently through the window and sometimes going a day or two without speaking. Still, he's come a long way for a guy with about the worse case of PTSD Sam has ever seen.

It's a lazy Saturday morning and for Sam, that means getting out some flour, eggs and sugar. He's breaking the ninth and final egg for his pound cake when he looks up to see Barnes sitting at the kitchen table, like he's been there all along.

“Can I?” Barnes asks, then grabs another egg from the box and cracks it into the bowl in an alarmingly fluid movement. The shell splits cleanly, and Sam is filled with the sudden thought of Barnes using that metal hand to crush a person's skull; he tries not to shiver.

“It needs another egg?” Sam stares at the pound cake mixture, frowning.

“Sometimes it comes out dry, right?” Barnes says matter-of-factly. “You always need to add an extra egg to whatever the recipe says.”

“Right. I'll take your word for it.” Sam raises an eyebrow, because none of the history books about Captain America and his Howling Commandos ever said that Bucky Barnes was known for his cake-baking and pastry work.

Barnes grins sheepishly, as if he knows what Sam is thinking. “I used to do this a lot. Grew up with three sisters. I can't cook worth shit, but I can bake. ”

Sam's throat tightens - he's read the books and the Smithsonian exhibit, but he's never thought about the implications, of the family Barnes left behind all those years ago.

“I'm sorry you never got to see them again," Sam says, making sure not to look at Bucky, to give him time to react on his own terms. He starts folding the eggs into the dry ingredients, focusing on the scrape of the wooden spoon against the side of the bowl.

Barnes doesn't say anything right away. When Sam finally looks up at him, Barnes runs a hand through his hair and sinks teeth into his lower lip; it's a nervous and unfailingly human gesture, incongruous with the bland efficiency of the Winter Soldier.

“Yeah, me too,” Bucky says. “But it's better this way, really. I'd rather they went to their graves not knowing what happened to me.”

There's something about his face when he looks at Sam - cold-blooded killer or not - a vulnerability that reminds Sam that despite the decades Barnes has lived, he's still so young - younger than him, technically.

Sam is still idly stirring the pound cake batter.

“What the fuck, Wilson?” Barnes grabs the spoon out of his hand and studies the bowl's contents with a critical eye. “You're over-beating this damn cake; it's gonna be tough as leather. I think I'd better take over.”

“Yeah, you do that.” Sam folds his arms and huffs while Barnes greases the tin with butter-paper, pours in the mix and smooths out the cake with practised movements, humming to himself.

When the cake comes out of the oven, Sam has to admit that it's superior to his usual efforts: the crumb is soft and meltingly rich in his mouth. He makes coffee and they take their slices of pound cake to the couch and eat them with gusto.

Barnes grabs the remote and tosses it to Sam. “Come on, let's watch this show Steve keeps going on about.”

“The Great British Bake Off? This year's series just started, we were watching all the reruns before.”

They sit there, picking at the remains of the pound cake while Barnes snarkily comments on the abilities of the bakers on the reality show - _”Come on, man, that's way too much flour, what are you even doing?”_ and _“Stupid fucker should have blind-baked the pie shell first. Rookie mistake.”-_ and it occurs to Sam that it feels a little bit like they're friends.

That's good: Steve would want them to be.

There was just one problem. The super-soldier assassin wasn't just the world's greatest sniper and thrower of stabby knives; of course he _had_ to be a crack baker, too. It was enough to make Sam grind his teeth.

Sam would probably hate Barnes if it wasn't so easy to like him. After that day, he starts calling him Bucky, and if he minds, he doesn't say a word.

***

“What the actual fuck have you brought into my kitchen?” Sam glares at the offending ingredients in horror: a can of applesauce, corn syrup, fucking _powdered egg._ He thinks about his organic unbleached flour and premium Madagascan vanilla extract in the cupboard above and grimaces. This is more than a kitchen takeover: this is unholy.

“Wartime special,” Bucky tells him, briskly sifting some flour into a mixing bowl.

“Your ma's applesauce cake. I remember,” Steve says fondly from where he's sitting at the table, sketching. “Bucky used to make this all the time, even on the road with the Commandos. He worked out how to do it over the fire.”

Sam is aghast. “It's the twenty-first century, grandpa. Newsflash, we don't have to eat shit like powdered egg anymore. I didn't know you could still buy it.”

“I prefer nonagenarian,” Steve says in a sulky tone.

“Anyway, it's the powdered egg that makes it.” Bucky grins and starts whisking in the sludgy applesauce, straight from the can. “Tried it with fresh, but it just doesn't taste like it did when we were kids, does it, Stevie?”

Steve goes pink to the tips of his ears at the affectionate nickname, and busies himself with his sketching.

Sam inwardly sighs; these two are constantly on the verge of making his teeth ache with sweetness. It'd be annoying if it didn't make his heart swell with happiness for them both. It would have been easy for him to feel excluded, watching Steve and Bucky grow back together, but in the months since Poland, it's been easier than he ever thought possible.

Bucky and Steve as a unit have a charm all their own, a strange sort of gravity that pulls everyone into their orbit of sunlit warmth.

Not that there haven't been bad times along the way. Months ago, the press got hold of the Winter Soldier story, and if it hadn't been for Potts and Hill and their careful handling of the situation, Bucky might have come out of it as something other than a long-imprisoned American war hero. He'd be visiting paediatric cancer wards for the rest of his life, but that wasn't exactly a hardship compared to seventy years of servitude under HYDRA. And he made sure to bring a ton of home-baked goodies with him on every visit; they always went down well with the kids, staff and families.

Of late, the bad times have been few and far between and Sam has found himself on a upward trajectory, too.

Since moving to New York (it made sense, with his Avengers commitments) he's been sleeping through the night most of the time and taken on more hours at the local Brooklyn VA chapter.

The empty space where Riley used to be is still there inside him; it's never not going to be there, but now there's a place for others.

Natasha has been persistently trying to set Sam up with girls the way she used to do with Steve; he hasn't taken her up on it yet, but he thinks one of these days, he might. The world feels full of possibilities.

Sam helps Bucky get the applesauce cake out of the oven, and for something made with such basic ingredients, it actually tastes pretty good.

“I'll give you that one,” Sam says, stuffing another forkful into his mouth.

Bucky grins lazily.

“You're still a terrible cook, Barnes,” Steve says, not looking up from his sketchbook. “But this cake ain't bad.”

“Fuck you, Rogers.” Bucky flips Steve off and hops up onto the counter to eat his own slice of cake.

 _Wish you would_ , thinks Sam wearily.

He doesn't so much mind the baking-as-a-sexual-metaphor thing that Bucky has going - it's more the fact that this same scene plays out in Sam's kitchen pretty much every week.

Sam has never seen Steve and Bucky do so much as kiss; it's all lingering touches and snarky asides and looks that say _I want to bend you over this table and fuck you until you can't see straight,_ and yet they never do a thing about it, as far as he can see.

Somebody around here really needs to get laid. Perhaps he and Natasha need to stage an intervention and just lock Barnes and Rogers in a reinforced SHIELD room with a bottle of lube.

He turns back to his cake, grinning to himself. These two might take over his kitchen and annoy the hell out of him, but at least they amuse him.

***

“We haven't done anything, you know. Nothing but kisses chaster than the ones you give your ma,” Bucky admits, glowering at his coffee mug. They're sitting at Sam's kitchen table, a batch of freshly baked red velvet cupcakes on the counter in front of them.

Sam exhales sharply. “Wow. It's been almost a year, and I see the way he looks at you. I thought...”

“He thinks I'm not ready.” Bucky pouts. “And you know as well as I do that Steve is a stubborn son of a bitch when he wants to be. He ain't budging on this one. Believe me, I've tried.” He sighs dramatically and reaches for a cupcake, pulling off the wrapper slowly.

It's a good thing Sam is unfailingly patient; having to listen to his friends droning on about each other on a regular basis might have gotten the better of a lesser man. He's probably used to it, is all, or maybe it's just that nobody can argue with the fact that Steve and Bucky deserve whatever weird-ass fucked-up relationship they have, and to talk about it all day long if they must.

Sam takes a sip of his Colombian roast, and decides he might as well ask the question.

“You might kick my ass for this, but you know there are all those books about you and Steve being well, more than best buddies during the war?”

Bucky visibly shudders and nods through a mouthful of cake. “Ugh, I know. Think the worst one I ever heard of was  _Going Commando: A Steve Rogers And Bucky Barnes Romance._  Natasha kept sending them to me, and when Tony got in on the act, well - you can imagine. He's got a recommendations list and everything. There are even people who write stories about us and post them online; it's kind of flattering I guess, but I really don't want to read a single word.”

“So...” Sam trails off, leaving the implication in the air. “Back then, was Stucky a thing? Were you guys _on?_ ”

With a raise of his eyebrow, Bucky laughs, the sound bubbling out of him, warm and natural; Sam can see echoes of the charming man he must have once been.

“Forget it, Sam. If I told you that, I'd have to kill you. And can we please stop with the awful portmanteau? It sounds too much like 'sticky', and the less said about that, the better.”

Sam laughs.

Bucky winks at him, and that's as good as an admission, as far as Sam is concerned.

Later, Sam calls Natasha. “Told you they did. You owe me a hundred bucks.”

“No worries,” she says cheerfully. “Barton owes me two hundred.”

***

Sam starts dating Cassie, a fellow counselor from the VA. It happens almost by accident: she likes baking, too, and she's nice, with pretty brown eyes and a four-inch scar on her arm from shrapnel she caught on a tour in Iraq. She lost a friend to an unexploded land mine, knows what it is to carry the weight of loss under your skin. Cassie understands without him having to say a word, and that's everything, because sometimes it's hard for him to explain the impact that losing Riley had on him.

They swap recipes for pies and breads and cakes, and before he knows what's hit him, they're having coffee at an artisan bakery down the street from the VA building and calling it a date.

On their second date, he takes her to Riley's grave at Arlington: the anniversary was coming up and somehow, he wanted to share that part of himself with her. It doesn't scare her off, even if Bucky says afterwards, _“You took her where, Wilson? Jesus, and I thought Steve was clueless about women. If you get some after this it's going to be a goddamn miracle.”_

It's been too long since he was in any kind of relationship, but it comes back easier than he thought it would. There are dinners out at casual neighbourhood places, trips to bakeries and a heck of a lot of really good sex. He likes her friends, and they haven't met each other's families yet, but it's just a matter of time.

For their four-month anniversary, he bakes her some maple bacon macaroons - a recent invention, super-soldier approved - and her face lights up like Christmas when he gives them to her. Sam finds himself thinking about Cassie in quiet moments, dreaming about her, and figures this might actually be something, now that he's finally ready to open his heart to it.

Cassie is remarkably unfazed about Sam's weird _other_ job involving a winged jetpack--that's as much as he can tell her without Coulson and Hill threatening to tase his ass--and he figures she can probably handle meeting two people who casually reference stuff from over seventy years ago in their conversations.

Steve and Bucky love her, of course - and when did that become so important to him? - and Natasha offers to have her tailed before she meets Cassie and they get on like a house on fire.

“I think this almost beats my grandmother's challah,” Cassie tells Bucky with a smile, when the four of them are sitting around a table eating the rich bread, spread thickly with butter and salt. “God rest her soul.”

Bucky leans forward in his chair, casually twining his fingers into Steve's. “Got the recipe from Sally Horowitz back in the thirties; her dad owned the bakery down the street.”

Steve snorts. “That's not all you got from her. You came back looking like the cat that got the cream.”

“C'mon, Steve. I was sixteen, and she was _gorgeous_.”

Natasha and Cassie exchange one of those silent looks that just means:  _boys._

“Don't worry about those two,” Natasha says, pointing at Barnes and Rogers who are currently gazing into each other's eyes, lost in their own private world. “They're more or less the world's most disgusting couple. You get used to the toothache after a while.”

"Yeah, think I figured that part out already." Cassie smiles.

Her hand slips into Sam's. She's smiling at him with clear, bright eyes and Steve's apartment smells like fresh-baked bread and his friends are here; it's good. Today, everything feels pretty okay, and that's a small miracle in itself.

“Think we can give Stucky a run for their money?” he murmurs, leaning into her.

“I fucking heard that,” says Bucky with a scowl.

“I like your weird friends,” Cassie whispers into Sam's ear, knowing full well they can all hear, and his shoulders shake with barely suppressed laughter.

 _You would have liked her, Riley_ , he thinks in his bed that night, before passing into a deep, dreamless sleep.

***

Fifteen months after the helicarriers fell into the Potomac, Sam lets himself into Steve's Williamsburg apartment, whistling to himself. Steve's asked him to drop by with some of Stark's new specs for Bucky's prosthesis; the obstinate bastard has refused upgrades on the metal arm thus far, but Sam is hoping Bucky might agree this time.

There's a soft sound up ahead, and he heads towards the kitchen. He isn't prepared for the sight that greets him.

Steve's kitchen is covered in flour handprints and Bucky has him pressed up against the countertop, buck naked and panting. Bucky is just as unclothed and on his knees, licking cake batter off Steve's stomach, and fucking hell, these two _do not_ get to ruin baking for Sam, of all things.

Sam lets out a startled yelp and Steve blanches, grabbing a chopping board that barely covers any of his massive physique, but at least it covers up the parts Sam really doesn't need to see.

Bucky straightens up, and _thank God_ , Steve's hipster packing-crate table is high enough that Sam avoids being mentally scarred by a glimpse of the Winter Soldier's dick.

“Oh, hey Sam,” Bucky says calmly, not a bit embarrassed, reaching up to run the metal hand through his rumpled sex-hair. “Guess you caught us at a bad time.”

“Bucky!” Steve's nostrils are flaring and he's turning beet red.

“Yeah, I really should be going.” Sam turns around and walks out so fast he thwacks his head on the door frame. He pretends not to hear Steve calling after him  _"You need to put some ice on that?"_ and Bucky hissing  _"Shut the fuck up, we ain't finished here,"_ in response before the door shuts at his back. _  
_

He pulls out his phone, head throbbing and texts Natasha: _It's official: Stucky turned into 'fucky'. You heard it here first._

 _I'm not going to ask how you know that_ , she texts back.

The three hundred dollars he collects from Hill, Potts and Stark don't quite make up for the disturbing image that's burned into his brain or the bump on his temple, but he's not complaining, either.

Sam couldn't be happier for Steve and Bucky, and he's also never going to bake a damn thing in Steve's kitchen again.

***

The next day, Sam bakes fifty Italian wedding cookies and messengers a boxful over to Steve's apartment with a card marked _“Congratulations.”_

Steve texts him: _You're an asshole. P.S. They're good cookies. P.P.S. You might want to knock next time._

Cassie reads the text over his shoulder with half a cookie in her mouth and laughs, spraying crumbs on to his shirt.

"I still can't believe you sent Captain America sex cookies."

**Author's Note:**

> I'm ridiculous. Also, y'all need to watch _The Great British Bake Off_ if you don't: reality TV baking is EPIC.


End file.
